Letting Tepco “Clean Up” Fukushima Is Like Letting a Murderer Do Brain Surgery On a VIP

… If an incompetent doctor killed numerous patients doing routine surgery – and then lied and tried to cover it up – would you let him perform brain surgery on a VIP such as the president?

Of course not?

So why are we letting Tepco to remove the fuel rods from Fukushima?

Tepco has an abysmal track record:

Engineers warned Tepco and the Japanese government many yearsbefore the accident that the reactors were seismically unsafe … and that an earthquake could wipe them out

The Fukushima reactors were fatally damaged before the tsunami hit … the earthquake took them out even before the tidal wave hit

An official Japanese government investigation concluded that the Fukushima accident was a “man-made” disaster, caused by “collusion” between government and Tepco and bad reactor design

Tepco knew right after the 2011 accident that 3 nuclear reactors had lost containment, that the nuclear fuel had “gone missing”, and that there was in fact no real containment at all. Tepco has desperately been trying to cover this up for 2 and a half years … instead pretending that the reactors were in “cold shutdown”

Tepco just admitted that it’s known for 2 years that massive amounts of radioactive water are leaking into the groundwater and Pacific Ocean

Tepco – with no financial incentive to actually fix things – has only been pretending to clean it up. And see this

Tepco’s recent attempts to solidify the ground under the reactors using chemicals has backfired horribly. And NBC News notes: “[Tepco] is considering freezing the ground around the plant. Essentially building a mile-long ice wall underground, something that’s never been tried before to keep the water out. One scientist I spoke to dismissed this idea as grasping at straws, just more evidence that the power company failed to anticipate this problem … and now cannot solve it.”

And yet Tepco is going to attempt the equivalent of brain surgery on the president.

Specifically – as we noted in 2012 – the greatest short-term threat to humanity is from the fuel pools at Fukushima.

If one of the pools collapsed or caught fire, it could have severe adverse impacts on the United States. Indeed, a Senator called it a national security concern for the U.S.:

The radiation caused by the failure of the spent fuel pools in the event of another earthquake could reach the West Coast within days. That absolutely makes the safe containment and protection of this spent fuel a security issue for the United States.